Low-Tech Thoreau; or, Remediations of the Human in The Dispersion of Seedshttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/640083
<p></p>
However diverse recent posthumanist and ecocritical projects have been, those focused on the imbrication of humans and nature have generally been organized as recognitions or disclosures of the integration of the human with the nonhuman as an always, already, abiding condition. Insofar as this is the case, these projects are essentially continuous with the major literary critical accounts of Henry David Thoreau’s canonical works (from R. W. B. Lewis through Sharon Cameron and Laurence Buell) that configure the Thoreauvian problematic of naturalizing the human in terms of recognizing, disclosing, or otherwise actualizing an extant continuity of the human with nature.1 The argument of this essay, however, is that
... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/article/640092">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmallLow-Tech Thoreau; or, Remediations of the Human in The Dispersion of Seeds2016-12-02text/htmlen-USWayne State University PressLow-Tech Thoreau; or, Remediations of the Human in The Dispersion of SeedsMahon, Derek,Pater, Walter,East AsiaEnglish literatureSpicer, JackPhotography2016-12-022016TWOProject MUSE®1252022016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-12-02“Listen to the Leaves”: Derek Mahon’s Evolving Ecologieshttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/640084
<p></p>
“New York Time,” previously “The Hudson Letter” (1996), opens in “Winter,” and the poetic speaker is awoken amid snow and ice in New York City to the combined but competing strains of “the first bird and the first garbage truck.”1 These “garbage trucks,” which will later discharge their discarded cargoes onto the “refuse barges” (NCP, 167) of the fourth section, “Waterfront,” of the sequence, are twinned with the early-morning avian chorus outside the beleaguered speaker’s apartment window. The discordant sonority of the metropolis’s daybreak exposes the tonal ambiguity of the longer poetic sequence at the same time as it addresses, in cursory fashion, the dynamics of the human and nonhuman ecological crisis. Derek
... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/article/640092">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmall“Listen to the Leaves”: Derek Mahon’s Evolving Ecologies2016-12-02text/htmlen-USWayne State University Press“Listen to the Leaves”: Derek Mahon’s Evolving EcologiesMahon, Derek,Pater, Walter,East AsiaEnglish literatureSpicer, JackPhotography2016-12-022016TWOProject MUSE®981252016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-12-02Sadistic Aestheticism: Walter Pater and Octave Mirbeauhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/640085
<p></p>
Clara, the English femme fatale of Octave Mirbeau’s decadent novel Torture Garden (1931) (Le Jardin des supplices, 1899), takes a weekly stroll through an expansive garden to admire both the striking flowers and what she considers to be equally arresting, and sexually exciting, scenes of torture. The tortured bodies—mutilated Chinese convicts—are narrated as aesthetic objects, like the flowers. These flowers are described with attention to shape, color, and composition:Irises rose up out of the water, their long stems bearing extraordinary flowers whose petals were coloured like old earthenware vases: precious glazes that were purplish blood-coloured; sinister purples; blue flames twisted with orange-ochre. . . .
... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/article/640092">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmallSadistic Aestheticism: Walter Pater and Octave Mirbeau2016-12-02text/htmlen-USWayne State University PressSadistic Aestheticism: Walter Pater and Octave MirbeauMahon, Derek,Pater, Walter,East AsiaEnglish literatureSpicer, JackPhotography2016-12-022016TWOProject MUSE®1238422016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-12-02The Anyan Strait and the Far East: John Donne’s Global Vision and Theological Cosmopolitanismhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/640086
<p></p>
On 16 September 2009, two German ships—the Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight—passed Novaya Zemlya, an island off Russia’s north coast. Global warming has serendipitously opened up the fabled Northwest Passage, an Arctic route that had been earnestly sought after and ultimately deemed impassable by navigators in early modern England. While modern nations compete over their rights to the polar sea-lanes, few realize that the Arctic dream has originated from England’s desire to reach China and the Far East in the sixteenth century. This essay traces the genesis of the Arctic passage project as related to the China dream by examining the historical and metaphorical associations of John Donne’s image of the Anyan
... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/article/640092">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmallThe Anyan Strait and the Far East: John Donne’s Global Vision and Theological Cosmopolitanism2016-12-02text/htmlen-USWayne State University PressThe Anyan Strait and the Far East: John Donne’s Global Vision and Theological CosmopolitanismMahon, Derek,Pater, Walter,East AsiaEnglish literatureSpicer, JackPhotography2016-12-022016TWOProject MUSE®856002016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-12-02Getting Loti’s Drifthttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/640087
<p></p>
Perhaps more than any other novel, Aziyadé (1879), Pierre Loti’s hyperromanticized tale of an English officer’s clandestine love affair with a beautiful Turkish woman, holds pride of place among Orientalist literary fantasies of penetrating the harem and achieving forbidden bliss. At the same time, ever since its publication, Aziyadé has provided fodder for detractors intent on calling its heterosexual love story—along with the author’s sexuality—into question. Such innuendos reach from the conjecture of Loti’s contemporary, Edmond de Goncourt, that Loti’s “love, in his first book, was a monsieur,” to Roland Barthes’s hyperbolic praise of the novel, a century after its publication, as “a minor Sodomite epic.”1 I
... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/article/640092">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmallGetting Loti’s Drift2016-12-02text/htmlen-USWayne State University PressGetting Loti’s DriftMahon, Derek,Pater, Walter,East AsiaEnglish literatureSpicer, JackPhotography2016-12-022016TWOProject MUSE®1542252016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-12-02Communizing Currentshttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/640088
<p></p>
Despite what sometimes appear as fundamental differences within communization theory, its coherence proceeds from particular claims about class relations today or, more specifically, the forthright negation of standard political protocols to which class formation serves as the first of many steps towards communism. At least on paper, today’s communization theory finds its precursors certainly in Karl Marx’s Capital, but more specifically in twentieth-century theorists of the value-form associated with Neue Marx-Lektüre (New Marx Reading) in Germany, Jacques Camatte in France, and Amadeo Bordiga in Italy.1 Though communization’s constellation is certainly not limited to these schools or the years surrounding 1968
... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/article/640092">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmallCommunizing Currents2016-12-02text/htmlen-USWayne State University PressCommunizing CurrentsMahon, Derek,Pater, Walter,East AsiaEnglish literatureSpicer, JackPhotography2016-12-022016TWOProject MUSE®226842016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-12-02A Return to the Landscapehttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/640089
<p></p>
From his monograph’s title, we know that Ken Hiltner responds directly to the critical paradigms of the 1980s and 1990s set forth by Paul Alpers and Annabel Patterson that present pastoral as a political genre focused largely on court corruption and dissent. For those of us who were in graduate school in that time and in the decade after, the hold of these paradigms was tight, and Hiltner’s focus on the environment that is pastoral is in many ways a relief. His basic premise is that the changes that transpired from the expansion of the city, the increased use of coal, and the filling of the wetlands meant that the landscape was seen with new eyes. As a result, he argues, pastoral actually had to do with the
... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/article/640092">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmallA Return to the Landscape2016-12-02text/htmlen-USWayne State University PressA Return to the LandscapeMahon, Derek,Pater, Walter,East AsiaEnglish literatureSpicer, JackPhotography2016-12-022016TWOProject MUSE®93222016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-12-02Imagine This as Lyric Poetryhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/640090
<p></p>
“My vocabulary did this to me,” the oft-quoted “last words” of Jack Spicer, first reported by Robin Blaser and certainly to some extent apocryphal, is an ending that is also usefully a beginning, posing the problem of defining a poetics after Spicer. Even as he wrote “The Practice of Outside” in and around 1975, Blaser seemed to recognize and anticipate the limiting powers his essay would have on future Spicer criticism and named what the dual and often contradictory strands of that criticism might look like: “At first this essay was short and simple—about Jack. But that became a reduction which every twist and turn of the work denied—a biography without the world the poet earned or a split between the man and the
... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/article/640092">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmallImagine This as Lyric Poetry2016-12-02text/htmlen-USWayne State University PressImagine This as Lyric PoetryMahon, Derek,Pater, Walter,East AsiaEnglish literatureSpicer, JackPhotography2016-12-022016TWOProject MUSE®220902016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-12-02Questioning Colonial Photographyhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/640091
<p></p>
Zahid Chaudhary’s Afterimage of Empire treats the relationship between photography and colonialism, and the present and the past, encouraging its readers to meditate on questions rather than providing answers. Chaudhary poses critical questions about epistemology, ontology, evidence, value, and objectivity, extensively interweaving theoretical ruminations by seminal thinkers of modernity with close analyses of historical materials. This book will become one of a key group of challenging texts against which scholars of photography, modernity, and postcolonialism will need to locate their own work. In this regard, Afterimage of Empire establishes itself as a productive interface for scholars of photography across
... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/article/640092">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmallQuestioning Colonial Photography2016-12-02text/htmlen-USWayne State University PressQuestioning Colonial PhotographyMahon, Derek,Pater, Walter,East AsiaEnglish literatureSpicer, JackPhotography2016-12-022016TWOProject MUSE®149812016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-12-02Beginning Againhttp://muse.jhu.edu/article/640092
<p></p>
“It is time to write about ‘women and translation’ again,” writes Luise von Flotow at the start of her introduction to this collection of essays. Why again? The 1980s and 1990s saw a rash of writing about feminism and translation, born out of the effervescence of a period rich in questions about identity and language. First came occasional brief essays by women translators and then more serious attempts at theorizing translation and gender—in the form of essays and then books. Von Flotow recalls this history, giving a particular nod to feminist Bible translators who had already been addressing gender issues. She might also have mentioned the influential work of Gayatri Spivak, whose singular works on translation
... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/article/640092">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®http://muse.jhu.edu/2016-12-09T00:00:00-05:00http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmallBeginning Again2016-12-02text/htmlen-USWayne State University PressBeginning AgainMahon, Derek,Pater, Walter,East AsiaEnglish literatureSpicer, JackPhotography2016-12-022016TWOProject MUSE®85212016-12-09T00:00:00-05:002016-12-02